


perhaps my truth

by problematic_pleasures



Series: one day, be the end of me [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Introspection, M/M, Sexual Tension, bisexual negan, can be seen as canon compliant, use of the word queer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-08
Packaged: 2018-10-16 14:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10572975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/problematic_pleasures/pseuds/problematic_pleasures
Summary: Carl is curious; Negan divulges, at least a little bit.





	

**Author's Note:**

> still got bi!negan on the brain so this happened. enjoy!

“What was it like?”

Negan’s attention is drawn from idle reading to his lover, still in bed and still sex-flushed. In response to the query, Negan arches an eyebrow.

Carl sighs, put-upon, and roll from his back to his side. The blankets he’s under fall to his waist and leave his chest exposed and distracting. Even so, Negan keeps his eyes on Carl’s face, on his pink cheeks and the pouting turn of his lips. Carl tries again after a few moments of silence.

“What was it like, being… out?”

Negan ‘ah’s quietly under his breath. He closes the book in his lap and sets it aside. He turns his whole body to face Carl, to give the boy his full attention—or rather, to request full attention from the boy. “Why you askin’?”

“I’m curious,” Carl retorts, same as he had a few nights prior when he sprang a similar question on Negan. The discussion of sexualities had been short-lived, abandoned in favor of more interesting pursuits. Negan supposes he can’t be surprised that Carl is curious, that he has questions. “I never… I wasn’t old enough when this all started to be a _normal_ kid, you know that.”

“I do,” Negan agrees swiftly. “So you never had a chance for a mid-puberty crisis about who you wanted to fuck, why do you wanna know about me?”

Carl rolls his eyes, and Negan almost apologizes, almost retracts the words. There’s an often imbalanced give-and-take between them. Negan knows so much about Carl, but it doesn’t go the other way all the time. Carl’s whole life has been a walker-ridden hellhole but Negan—he had a life before that, and Carl makes it abundantly clear that he wants to know about _that_ life.

“Really?” Carl snipes. It’s a not-quite-argument they’ve had several times.

Negan decides to let Carl have this one.

“Do you want the whole spiel or the abridged version?”

Carl sits up with surprise written all over his face. The blankets fall further down his body and Negan lets himself get distracted by the finger-shaped bruises littering his pale hips. It’s only when Carl speaks that Negan looks him in the eye again.

“Whole spiel,” he echoes.

Negan nods. “Alright.” He sits back, gets comfortable. “In the beginning? It was shit.” He tries to think of some other way to explain it, but there just isn’t one. “Plain and fuckin’ simple, it sucked.”

“Did you—were you bullied?”

Negan laughs, even slaps his knee. “Fuck no, s’not like anyone actually _knew_.”

“You said—?”

“I know what I said, kid.” Negan sighs and reminds himself how much Carl hasn’t ever experienced; how little he’s really seen outside the bloody brutality they all know these days. “I didn’t go around shouting it from rooftops, ‘specially not in high school. The people who knew, knew. The people who didn’t, didn’t. For good reason.”

Carl’s lips are open in the most inviting ‘o’ shape, but Negan doesn’t give in.

“It got better, people cared less when you got older.” The words, as they slip from his mouth, seem to age Negan ten, twenty years. He thinks back to the last time he talked about this, the last time any of it mattered and it all feels like a lifetime or two ago. “College? No one gave a shit, n’if they did you’d deck them in the teeth.”

Carl starts to smile, but the curiosity rolls off him in waves.

“Shit, I dunno what you want me to say. I went to some pride parades, I wasn’t some fuckin’ queen.”

“Did you—did you have a ‘mid-puberty crisis?’” Carl asks with just enough bite in his voice to keep the air light, funny, teasing.

Negan pinches the bridge of his nose.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“Well you clearly wanna know and you’re not gonna leave it be, so I might as well fucking tell you.”

Carl isn’t cowed by the words.

“I think everybody had a crisis. I think anyone who _wasn't_ straight had a crisis, cuz you spend all this time hearing about that shit being wrong. That shit being the stuff that sends you straight to hell.” Negan pauses, laughs. “Pun intended.”

Carl isn’t amused though.

Negan, faced with the hardened lines of his lover’s still delicate face, feels suddenly exhausted. He waves off whatever words he’d planned to say next. “None of that matters, kid. Not anymore.”

“It might, someday.”

“Well, when it does? I’ll tell you whatever the fuck you wanna hear. But for now? Doesn’t mean shit what happened back then. All that matters is right now.” Negan steels himself; he braces himself for Carl to argue, to demand access to the history and feelings still locked up tight inside Negan’s chest.

It never comes. Carl clears his throat and like a spell Negan’s full attention is on him, without malice or apprehension. Carl pats the bed softly, expectantly.

Negan stands and starts to shed his clothes. By the time he’s nude Carl has scooted over to make room for him in the bed. Carl doesn’t reach for him immediately—or, at least, not with hunger or desperation. He moves slowly to curl his arms around Negan’s middle and presses his face against the rough chest hair scattered across Negan’s skin.

Negan, similarly, moves carefully. He takes Carl by the waist and lets his other hand comb through Carl’s hair. “Count yourself lucky.”

Carl looks up and his expression is far from impressed.

“You don’t gotta worry about trivial shit like that. Weight off your chest, you never gotta know how that bullshit feels.”

Carl considers the words, and Negan loses himself in the sweet crease between his eyebrows. It always speaks to confusion, concentration—and hell, it’s cute.

“I guess,” Carl agrees eventually. “Lotta other shit to worry about.”

“I’d _gladly_ take a half dozen walkers over narrow-minded fucks that think they—?”

Carl’s grinning and shaking with muted laughter. Negan’s words die in his throat and he waits out Carl’s mirth. “It’s just… different, to see you so righteous.”

Negan, for a single split second, sees his past and his future in Carl’s good-natured smile. He sees Lucille, who loved him so desperately, and he sees a handful of others before her that loved just as strongly. He sees a depth of feeling in the iris of that single eye, and swallows his fear. He sees a time beyond where they are now, when things like _this_ will start to matter again—when bigots and idiots will rise again, despite the hell they’ve all endured. He sees a future, and can’t even begin to fathom what that future would really be like.

Carl’s smile dims. “Negan?”

Negan blinks and both the visions melt away, leaving just the two of them in bed. “S’nothing.” He doesn’t say _bad memories_ and he doesn’t say _hopes and dreams_. Both of those would be—too much. “It’s nothing,” he says again.

Carl still seems curious, but lets it drop. “Wanna sleep?”

Negan snorts. “It’s not even two in the goddamn afternoon.” He has no idea what time it is, none of them do, but it’s definitely too bright out to be remotely close to nighttime.

Carl’s eyes spark with mischief. “Wanna do something else?” He doesn’t wait for an answer; he shoves at Negan’s chest and clambers into his lap. The hand once tangled in Carl’s hair falls to his hip instead, so that his slender waist is trapped between both of Negan’s palms. Carl looks at Negan from heavy brown bangs. “Well?”

“ _Well_ ,” Negan mimics, “since you asked so nicely.”


End file.
